A look at the lexicography of medieval French on the occasion of a new dictionary

Large dictionaries are available for studying or understanding the vocabulary of medieval French. Among completed works, the most useful are Frédéric Godefroy's Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française (10 vol., 1880-1902), Adolf Tobler and Erhard Lommatzsch'sAltfranzösisches Wörterbuch (11 vol., 1915-2002) and Walther von Wartburg's Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (25 vol., 1922-2002). Works in progress include the Dictionnaire Etymologique de l'Ancien Français, begun in 1971 by Kurt Baldinger, continued by Frankwalt Möhren and now by Thomas Städtler; Robert Martin's Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, the 2015 version of which has just been put online; and theAnglo-Norman Dictionary which, after its ^1st edition from 1977 to 1992, is now on the Internet in its^2nd edition, edited by David Trotter until his recent death. But what was missing was a one-volume working tool based on the latest lexicographical findings. The Dictionnaire du français médiéval I published in 2015 (Les Belles Lettres) aims to remedy this deficiency.

The three major completed dictionaries naturally serve as a basis for writing each article. But nothing can be done mechanically. We must always be vigilant to avoid repeating the mistakes of our predecessors. To achieve this, it is sometimes necessary to go back to handwritten sources. For example, Godefroy's reading of the word airon in Gautier de Coinci's Les Miracles de Nostre Dame is a misreading of the lesson arçon by Abbé Poquet, which the lexicographer collected without examination, attributing it to the manuscript known as de Soissons (Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions françaises 24541). Similarly, the word arrerai, cited without definition by Tobler and Lommatzsch from Guillaume Guiart's La Branche des royaux lignages , is a misreading by the Buchon editor, the manuscript (Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 5698, p. 107a) giving anemis instead. If these words are not included in my dictionary, it's because I consider them non-existent.

Quotations also need to be checked, as our predecessors sometimes make mistakes in a number of ways (truncated passages, erroneous attributions, misunderstanding or dating, etc.). What's more, they don't always record the earliest testimonies. If we examine how the noun pieton "foot soldier" is treated in dictionaries, we immediately realize that they have neglected its earliest attestation, found in Guillaume Guiart's La Branche des royaux lignages (t. 2, verse 7897 of the Buchon edition; lesson confirmed by the manuscript, p. 285a). Similarly, although recent dictionaries consider Geoffroi Gaimar, author of the Estoire des Englais, to be the first to have used the adverb hastivement, it appears earlier in the Cambridge Psalter and Benedeit's Voyage de saint Brendan. Despite its limited scope, my dictionary endeavors to collect attestations neglected by our predecessors.

Since the beginning of Romance studies, the geographical aspect of vocabulary has not escaped the attention of a few scholars. Scholars such as Gaston Paris, Antoine Thomas, Félix Lecoy, Kurt Baldinger, Albert Henry and Gilles Roques have each shown how a particular word had a restricted distribution in medieval French. However, Godefroy's dictionary and that of Tobler and Lommatzsch did not emphasize this aspect sufficiently, and their readers could hardly understand that words such as conobrage, conobrer, essancier and sancier did not belong to standard medieval French. Only an assiduous consultation of Wartburg's etymological dictionary and the works of lexicographers published in Romania, Revue de linguistique romane or Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, etc., could give them useful clues as to the more or less restricted spread of the vocabulary. As I have included geographical indications in the articles for a number of words, referring to Wartburg's dictionary and any additional references, readers will now find it easier to keep abreast of their geography. In fact, medieval French (from 842 to the end of the ^15th century) is not just Francien, but also the French of the various continental regions; it also covers the French used in England, Italy and the Holy Land. This is the first time that a portable dictionary has indicated the regional character of words.

Finally, to complement the achievements of my predecessors, I have extracted a number of words from texts which they had not examined with sufficient care. Even literary monuments such as the Chanson de Roland provide us with unknown attestations if we are interested in the versions that lexicographers had seldom visited. Sometimes it's worth thinking outside the box.

Obviously, my Dictionary of Medieval French is only a provisional attempt. I do not claim that it is the only conceivable tool. It will undoubtedly be noted that my use of existing dictionaries is not sufficiently critical, that my indications on regional character are insufficient, that I have omitted numerous pivotal attestations and that my textual analysis is far from satisfactory. My work will then serve as a counter-example. And yet, we all know that we learn more from bad examples than from good ones. If, therefore, someone is scandalized by my work and wishes to undertake another dictionary to replace it, based on an ambitious conception, he or she will be doing an immense service to readers and lexicographers of medieval French, or of French at all.

Program

Guest lecturer

14:30 - 15:30

A look at the lexicography of medieval French on the occasion of a new dictionary

Program

How to read medieval French dictionaries ?

Regional vocabulary

Searching for pivotal attestations

Off the beaten track

See also